SENEM: A software engineering-enabled educational metaverse

Abstract

Context:The term metaverse refers to a persistent, virtual, three-dimensional environment where individuals may communicate, engage, and collaborate. One of the most multifaceted and challenging use cases of the metaverse is education, where educators and learners may require multiple technical, social, psychological, and interaction instruments to accomplish their learning objectives. While the characteristics of the metaverse might nicely fit the problem’s needs, our research points out a noticeable lack of knowledge into (1) the specific requirements that an educational metaverse should actually fulfill to let educators and learners successfully interact towards their objectives and (2) how to design an appropriate educational metaverse for both educators and learners. Objective:In this paper, we aim to bridge this knowledge gap by proposing SENEM, a novel software engineering-enabled educational metaverse. We first elicit a set of functional requirements that an educational metaverse should fulfill. Method:In this respect, we conduct a literature survey to extract the currently available knowledge on the matter discussed by the research community, and afterward, we assess and complement such knowledge through semi-structured interviews with educators and learners. Upon completing the requirements elicitation stage, we then build our prototype implementation of SENEM, a metaverse that makes available to educators and learners the features identified in the previous stage. Finally, we evaluate the tool in terms of learnability, efficiency, and satisfaction through a Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation research approach, leading us to the iterative refinement of our prototype. Results:Through our survey strategy, we extracted nine requirements that guided the tool development that the study participants positively evaluated. Conclusion:Our study reveals that the target audience appreciates the elicited design strategy. Our work has the potential to form a solid contribution that other researchers can use as a basis for further improvements.